VOICES: Fighting unions in bizarro world

Some right-wingers in Congress appear to be envious of their state
counterparts who have been attacking labor rights in legislatures across
the country.

They were given an opportunity to engage in some union-bashing of their own at a recent hearing of the House subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, known as HELP.

The Right is already up in arms
about a National Labor Relations Board complaint charging Boeing with
shifting work from its unionized operations in Washington State to
union-unfriendly South Carolina to retaliate against worker activism.
Now HELP chair Phil Roe of Tennessee (in photo) is accusing the Board of making it
easier for unions to use corporate campaign tactics against employers.

Roe and other panel Republicans seem to be living in a parallel
universe in which large numbers of companies are forced to their knees
by ruthless corporate campaigns, and workers suffer from intimidation
not from anti-union employers but from labor thugs who will stop at
nothing in their organizing efforts.

The depiction of this bizarro world was aided by the choice of
witnesses at the hearing. There were, of course, no union
representatives. Instead, the panel included the president of a
janitorial company in Indiana that had been targeted by the Service
Employees International Union; a contractor from New Mexico representing
the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors; and a partner in
the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which is infamous for its
work in opposition to organizing drives.

The only shred of legitimacy came from the one other
witness -- Catherine Fisk, a law professor from the University of
California-Irvine -- whose testimony documented the legal justification for
the tactics that make up corporate campaigns. But she was mainly
ignored by the subcommittee Republicans, who spent most of their time
lavishing praise on the two business owners, especially the janitorial
executive, David Bego, who has self-published a book about his struggle
with the SEIU entitled "The Devil at my Doorstep."

Excerpts
from the book on the web begin as follows: "It was a nasty, ugly,
three-year, million-dollar war I did not ask for, but had to win.
Otherwise, the business I loved would be infiltrated by a scheming labor
union determined to undermine employee privacy rights and destroy my
version of the American Dream." Bego also pursued his dream by campaigning aggressively against the Employee Free Choice Act.

Attacks on corporate campaigns have surfaced before in Congress from
time to time. These go nowhere, because any restrictions would
inevitably violate the First Amendment and the National Labor Relations
Act. The real counter-offensive comes in the courts, where large
companies such as Smithfield Foods, Wackenhut and Cintas have filed
racketeering lawsuits to harass unions engaged in such campaigns.

Apart from the Boeing-NLRB controversy, which has little to do with
corporate campaigns, it is curious that a new foray against this union
tool would occur now. Unfortunately, there has not been an explosion of
aggressive organizing drives, and union density in the private sector is
dwindling.

But perhaps Rep. Roe is concerned about what may be coming next in
his home state. Roe's district is not far from Chattanooga, where
Volkswagen recently opened a $1 billion auto assembly plant. The workers
there currently have no union protection, but that could change. The
United Auto Workers has announced
a new effort to organize the foreign auto plants clustered in the
southeast, and the union's new president Bob King vows it will be much
more vigorous than past initiatives.

The UAW has not indicated which producer will be targeted first, but
VW is probably a leading candidate. The German company recently shook up
the auto world by revealing
that it will keep its labor costs in Chattanooga far below not only
those of its Detroit rivals but also those of U.S. plants run by
Japanese competitors such as Toyota and Honda. With wage and benefit
offerings at rock-bottom level, VW workers might very well be receptive
to what the UAW has to offer.

A successful union organizing drive in eastern Tennessee would be a
nightmare for the likes of Phil Roe. Fortunately, there is probably
little he can do to prevent that possibility.